“No matter what he was driving for, he was there to good purpose,” said my godmother.

“True for you, Miss Mary,” Neil responded placidly.

And I, too, I wondered how it was that Richard Dawson had been abroad at such an hour of the night.  But I did not wait to think of that.  I was proud and glad of the thing he had done, and I remembered how I had said to him that he was brave and how pleased he had been.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

CONFESSION

Christmas passed and the dark days turned round to New Year, and New Year came and there were great clumps of snowdrops pushing up their delicate, drooping heads in all the shrubberies, neighbouring the patches of snow, for we had had a white Christmas and a white New Year.

We had settled down to the new ways of life as though the old had not been.  There was perfect peace and happiness at Aghadoe.  In the spring the workmen were to set to work at the task of renovating the Abbey.  Uncle Luke and my godmother were to be married before Lent, quietly.  As for me, I waited, till my whole life had become one expectation.

After the funeral at Damerstown was over I had gone to see Mrs. Dawson, having ascertained first that her son was absent for a few days.  The poor woman had wept over me and forgiven me.

“Rick told me all,” she said.  “Sure, I wish you could have cared for him for himself.  Only his mother knows how much good there is in him.  And, dear, you must try to forgive him that’s gone.”

“We have forgiven him,” I said, “as we hope for forgiveness.”

Then she wept again softly, and poured out to me her hopes and fears for her boy.

“It’s gone deep with him, dear,” she said:  “it’s gone very deep with him.  But, sure, we must trust to God to bring good out of the trouble.  He’d never have done you that wrong to marry you and you fond of some one else.  You don’t mind my knowing, dear?  My boy tells me everything.  Sure, I’d have known it, for if there was no one else you must have cared for Rick.”

“Some one else will care for him,” I said.

“Indeed, I wouldn’t mind who he married if she was good and fond of him and would keep him at home.  He won’t leave me now, not for a bit—­till I’m happier; but he says it’s best he should go, that he has a reason for going.  Ah, well; he’ll settle down some time, when he’s got over this.”

It might have been three weeks later when we heard that Richard Dawson had taken the small-pox and was lying ill at the Cottage.  The illness was complicated, it was feared, by his having driven in the night to the small-pox hospital and asked to be taken in there, but there had been a recrudescence of the plague, and the place was crowded to the doors.  Dr. Molyneux was working there like ten men, and it was his idea to have Richard Dawson taken to the Cottage, which was much nearer than Damerstown.  We heard that the night journey, which was like to cost him his life, had been undertaken when he found the illness coming on, to prevent as much as might be the danger of infection to the large household at Damerstown.  He was very ill indeed, and the doctors hardly thought he could live.